In New Delhi, eleven nations representing nearly half of humanity have gathered under the BRICS banner — not in harmony, but in the deliberate pursuit of shared leverage. India's Prime Minister Modi hosts a summit where the agenda of economic alternatives and payment sovereignty masks deeper fractures: wars between member-states' allies, unresolved border disputes, and competing visions of what this bloc is even meant to be. It is a gathering that reveals something enduring about the post-unipolar world — that nations need not agree on much to agree that they want more room to maneuver.